The New York Times Thinks Gays Have Gone Too Far (with Chase Strangio)

The first Pride was a conference sponsored by MasterCard.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I'm pissed off.

On June 26th, capping off Pride Month, the New York Times published an essay titled, Chase, do you want to read the title?

I am so ready to read the title.

How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and lost its way.

By a little man named Andrew Sullivan.

Let's put a pin in him for now.

When I saw this title, I thought, Matthew, it's June 26th.

There's four days left of Pride Month.

Just enjoy yourself.

Protect your peace.

But then, but then, two days later, I receive a text from my father.

Do you want to read the text from my father?

Give it the masculine touch.

I read this in the opinion section of the New York Times.

It's long, but worthwhile.

And I'd I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Love you, Dad.

Dad, I love you too.

And when I got this text, I remembered that whether or not I want it to be, the New York Times is the paper of record in the United States.

And so I can ignore how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way by Andrew Sullivan, but that won't stop it.

from reaching a huge amount of other people around the world, people who may otherwise not be engaged with queer political discourse.

People like my dad, who I love and who has a genuinely open heart and mind about this stuff, but also who sees something written in the New York Times about how the crazy queers have overplayed their hand in this whole human rights nonsense and assume it's legitimate because of the big name at the top of the paper.

So dad, I love you.

This one's for you.

Now, initially, I had a more complicated structure for this episode, but then I realized that the most logical way to do this, both for me as a podcaster and for you as a listener, is just to read the damn essay.

As we go along, we'll get into the meat of questions like, what is the best way to ask people in power for human rights?

Should gay people have started winding down the movement after we won marriage equality?

And the question on everyone's lips, what is the point of the New York Times?

To help me answer.

Don't I sound excited?

I know I am, I am.

To help us answer such questions, I feel so honored today to be joined by Chase Strangio.

He is a lawyer at the ACLU and recently became the first transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court in the Scrimetti case.

And he has also been the recent target of the full weight of the New York Times, including of this essay that we are about to dissect.

So, Chase, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I am really happy to be here.

Chase, it's been been a big month.

How are you doing right now before we start?

So I'm actually doing okay.

And

that's because

for me, I think there's sort of two things that are always true.

And one is that I am always just completely and utterly obsessed with being queer and trans.

And so

I am, no matter what is going on in the world, no matter what the public discourse about our community is, I'm always grounded in that reality of deep, deep love.

And it brings me so much joy and happiness.

And I think of it every day as such a gift to get to live as myself.

That drives both my work and my sense of groundedness in the world.

So, so that keeps me doing okay.

And I am also okay because it's summer and I love summer.

And even though New York smells so bad, I am just like really grateful for the opportunity to walk around, to go on trips on the weekend, and and to try to live my best trans New Yorker life in 2025.

Yeah, the scent of urine is really permeating through the windows as we speak.

But that's okay, because in the words of Addison Ray, I love New York.

It's my religion.

So before we get into this essay, Chase, there's two things that I want to establish for a little context.

One is the New York Times' role in the current very successful anti-trans panic.

Two, who the hell is Andrew Sullivan?

I want to yield the first part of that to you.

For people who aren't super plugged into what's going on over there, could you explain like what the deal is with the New York Times and trans people?

Yeah, so I have been really focused on the way the New York Times has covered trans people, our rights, and our bodies for the last decade, because it is really striking.

And I think the first thing to keep in mind is that there is a very outsized focus on trans people within the pages of the New York Times.

And one of the ways that political scapegoating can happen is when a group of people who are a very small minority are given outsized attention because people have this distorted idea of how many people there are and how salient questions about their life are.

And this is one of the key things about New York Times coverage that we have to put into context, which is that front page, both magazine and newspaper coverage has been devoted to trans people.

So whatever that coverage was going to be, that outsized focus for a group of people that's a very small percentage of the population should raise some alarms.

And then when you look at the actual content of that coverage, it should raise even further alarms because a lot of it is focused on

some sort of entry point of, is there a big conspiracy about trans

people?

Are trans people coming for the definition of womanhood?

Are there too many trans kids?

How are schools dealing with the increasing number of trans people who are coming out at younger ages?

Why are all these kids asking for puberty blockers?

And the problem with that entry point is that it does not provide the reader with any context.

It is just offering these sort of suggestions that there is a problem, that there is a change, and that there's something people should be concerned about.

And then, in answering those questions that they've presented in this outsized fixation, they're laundering right-wing rhetoric about trans life and making it seem more palatable.

And then, over time, what happens is it becomes the norm, it becomes the baseline for people who aren't steeped in a conversation about transness.

And that's the sort of sea that we're living in right now, which is that there is this reflexive sense that something about trans medical care is off.

There's a reflexive sense that there's just all these new identities popping up and it's a fad.

There's this reflexive sense that someone is harmed by the existence of trans people.

And by creating that debate and that doubt, it has been a very fertile ground for a very well-funded right-wing movement to push a very, very insidious political and legal agenda.

And those two things are working in concert and have been for the last 10 years.

There was this great episode of the podcast You're Wrong About with Tuck Woodstock.

That if you're interested in more about the New York Times and their trans coverage, I think you should totally go listen to.

But they'll talk to like doctors who provide trans health care and then like someone they found on IHATETrans People123.co

and be like, well, let's listen to both sides.

And are they all equal?

Maybe.

Let's find out.

Yeah, I mean, and I think that's one of the problems with this outside coverage without the context.

You're sort of presented this idea that there's the pro-trans medical care side and then the anti-trans medical care side.

And then on the pro side, you have the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association, all the parents who know their kids.

You have decades of the evidence and clinical experience.

And then the other side, it's like the Catholic Medical Association.

And the same, and people who were experts in opposition to the provision of abortion.

But that context isn't provided.

It's just the names of two people.

And they're both doctors.

I'll get, you know, and yet they're completely ideologically embedded when it comes to this opposition side.

And I think that it also requires some, you know, lack of critical thinking, you know, on on the part of the reader that we're increasingly seeing, which is that the story is trans people

are being given health care easily without any thought, and their parents are just going along for the ride and all good with it.

And of course, we know that the majority of LGBT young people, you know, experience some tension with their families.

There's a long process of their families even coming to terms with their trans identities in the first instance.

And we still live in the United States where you have the worst health system you could possibly imagine.

So getting to see the doctor takes six to 12 months.

And then getting to see the specialist takes another six to 12 months.

And so this idea that people are walking into CVS and getting this medication alone, like it's Advil, is just really does not comport with what we should know about our health system and what we should know about our family.

Oh, and of course, the claims that children are getting sex changes in schools.

In schools.

I mean, you know, it's, I mean,

I have a 13-year-old in New York City Public schools, and there's no bathrooms that work.

There's barely any art classes.

And let me tell you, there are no medical procedures.

There's no funding for band-aids or crayons, but surely they're having transgender operations in between social studies and geometry.

So I want to talk a little bit about Andrew Sullivan and establish who this guy is who wrote this essay in the New York Times, which is essentially just like a respectability politics manifesto.

If you behaved a little more normally, we wouldn't be in this mess.

If you gays were just a little more like me, we'd be good.

So he is a middle-aged white cisgender guy.

He is a self-identified Catholic, conservative, out-gay man.

He has had a decades-long career in journalism that's turned him into kind of a celebrity journalist, I'd say.

The early years of that career, he used to be genuinely ahead of the curve in supporting gay marriage.

Chiefly, since the 90s, Andrew Sullivan has taken sort of a casual interest in race science.

Chase, you know about this?

I do.

I do.

So, and he is famous for while he was the editor at The New Republic, publishing The Bell Curve, or sections of The Bell Curve, and ultimately left The New Republic.

And I do think that one of the threads of a lot of his writing are different themes of genetic superiority and some of that sort of adopting these uh you know race science eugenics frameworks um for for a lot of his thought and i think you can also see it overall in his analysis of of power and support for alignment with with power which obviously in the united states in particular means aligning with

uh you know systems of white supremacy that elevate white men into positions of power and leadership he He has been for decades sort of like casually interested in the, you know, obviously widely debunked, very racist junk science belief that there's a link between race and IQ.

He previously said in an interview with the New York Times just a couple years ago that he thinks that Jews could be genetically smarter than other people.

So I love that this is the person who gets the word in the paper of record about the state of trans issues in this country.

Let's talk a little bit about his decades history of having positions on on queer issues.

So in 1996, after antiretroviral therapy became available for people living with HIV, that is the drug cocktail that turned HIV into something that you can live with and manage instead of die from.

But obviously also there are extreme disparities between who has access to it.

Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New York Times magazine that when those meds came out, the plague was over.

And this is something that I think we have to keep in mind in general when we get pieces that are talking about movements gone too far, the radicalization.

And then you can trace within both the individual writer or within the movement itself, the same recurring themes.

This idea that achievement of a baseline need for the most powerful and wealthy within a subset of the community means that the demands are over and that there is an opportunity

to, you know, sort of walk away.

That is part of every story.

And I think what's interesting here is that this particular writer has been making this same point over and over again for the last several decades.

When, you know, the most privileged in our queer and trans communities have access to something, then the suggestion is that we walk away.

Now, I think that's wrong for two reasons.

One is that it is immoral and unethical to only service the people who have the most power.

But even if we took the idea that that was a morally okay position, if you don't continue to demand justice, that it just gets taken away from everyone.

It's not self-serving to quote unquote walk away at the very beginning of accessing rights or material needs for a community.

Yeah, Andrew Sullivan's idea of social justice is one in which, where once he's gotten what he needs, he declares that like all efforts should end because like he's good now.

when he writes that the the aids crisis ended when meds became available theoretically right it's like well who are they available to well mostly rich white people in the united states and this is still the case like aids medication is still in in desperate need from underserved communities i mean even the availability of prep we know that it's less available to black people less available to trans people especially low-income trans people of color.

You know, there's such disparity in the availability of these life-saving drugs.

But for Andrew Sullivan, in 1996, it was over once he was able to get antiretroviral therapy.

For basically the entirety of his decades-long journalism career, Andrew Sullivan has argued, broadly speaking, that the best pathway forward for gay people is assimilation.

Chase, could you explain assimilation versus like liberation as like social justice concepts?

Yeah, I mean, I think specifically how this has played out in the gay rights movement, the LGBT movement, is is the question of, you know, does our movement seek to

join every aspect of dominant society and assimilate into the structures that exist?

Or is there a demand through our call for justice to change those structures, to offer a more liberatory framework informed by our life experiences?

And this is a tension in all movements.

You can look at any civil rights movement and there's sort of a rights-based orientation towards equal access to the same things just as they exist for others and then a sort of let's change things so that they're better for for everyone and and from the sensibility that we bring to it and I think that you know there's challenges to both orientations I think that I would say one of the salient critiques of an assimilationist model is that the dominant society has a power structure.

It has a power structure that once you assimilate into

your community, your marginalized community is going to reproduce that power structure.

And through the process of demanding equality under those formalistic terms,

there will always be disadvantages that are unequally distributed across a community.

That's sort of the main way to think about it.

A little bit more of Andrew Sullivan hot take history.

In 2007, he opposed hate crime laws, saying that they impeded on free speech.

Also, in 2007, he argued against the inclusion of trans people as a protected class under the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, saying that it should basically just be a gay person thing, that, like, why do we have to do this whole like transgender people too?

It's going to weigh us down.

Interestingly, he argues in the essay that we're going to read today about how great it is that trans people have anti-discrimination protections.

But it's like, okay, but you didn't support that when it was hard to support.

In 2019, he wrote a column in Intelligencer about how a lot of trans youth, he claims, are probably just gay and need time to grow out of it, which is something he's like still repeating today.

Like it's, he's been doing this for a really long time.

And it's like, well, if all of the trans people who are transitioning are actually just cisgender homosexuals, like, why haven't we heard from more of those people?

You know, in 2021, he wrote that it should be illegal for doctors to prescribe hormones to trans youth.

And so going into this essay, the premise that we're supposed to accept is that like we all want freedom for LGBT people,

but Andrew Sullivan, the author, is saying, well, I just disagree with the methods.

I think we're being too extreme to try to achieve the thing that we all want.

But then looking at this history, kind of the question that stands out to me is like, well, does Andrew Sullivan actually want freedom for LGBT people?

It kind of very much feels like that viral tweet that was like, this does not help your cause, says the guy who hates you and your cause.

That's one of the themes of New York Times coverage too that we see is this, we're just trying to help you while we are undermining your entire

framework for existing.

The Spider-Man meme when the articles came out after Scrametti, that sort of like, who did this?

Who caused this?

And it was, you know, it's the coverage.

It's the coverage that caused this.

And yet they were so eager to put the blame on the group of people who has desperately been trying to dig ourselves out of thousands of bills limiting our rights, a public discourse that situates us as a threat to others.

And then the ongoing suggestion that this is a debate that needs to be waged.

Should we read the essay?

Let's do it.

Do my best Andrew Sullivan voice.

I don't know what Andrew Sullivan sounds like, but he's British.

Here we go.

10 years ago, Thursday, the movement for gay and lesbian equality scored a victory that only a decade before had seemed unimaginable.

We won equal rights to civil marriage in every state in the country.

In 2020 came another stunning win, Stunin.

In a majority opinion written by one of President Trump's nominees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court found that gay men, lesbians, and transgender men and women are covered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and protected from employer discrimination.

In 2024, the Republican Party removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform, and the current Republican Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, is a married gay man with two children.

Gay marriage is backed by around 70% of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians, and transgender people is opposed by 80%.

As civil rights victories go, it doesn't get more decisive or comprehensive than this.

But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs.

Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, and staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives, including the end of HIV in the United States as an unstoppable plague, gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite.

Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the social justice left, they radicalized.

So.

Liza, I didn't tell you the British voice was going to be good.

I know the Brits are going to yell at me, but I thought it was okay.

I am not doing a British voice because we would all suffer.

You absolutely don't need to.

That was not a requirement when I asked you to be on this podcast.

The first thing that I just want to say about what's going on here, swayed by the broader liberal shift to the social justice left, they radicalized.

The entire premise of this, even in the title, the gay movement radicalized.

Can someone remind me what the major 1969 event that catalyzed the modern LGBT movement in the U.S.

was?

Was Stonewall, a conference of Deloitte consultants meeting with one another to respectfully discuss should gay people have rights sponsored by MasterCard?

Well, I mean, the other thing, yes, I mean, there's that aspect of it, but also, I mean,

the movement was told that demanding marriage was radical.

So this idea is also dependent on context.

So it's someone is deciding what is radical or not and deciding whether that's good or bad.

But these are all deeply contingent ideas.

I mean, it used to be seen as unimaginably radical that gay people would adopt children, that gay people would get married.

And those demands were cast as being outside of public opinion too

radical.

And so there's that piece of it too, which is, A, we come from a long tradition of truly radical resistance, including disruption.

And also every single thing we've demanded, including service, open service in the military and marriage, were also cast as radical demands.

And so

it's totally ahistorical to suggest that it's only now that these demands that the movement has made have been deemed radical.

So, and the other thing that's hard about this lead is this idea that there was this success.

And then

what happened next was new people came in

and swayed the movement.

And that's wrong for two reasons that I think are important to note.

One is, so I'll just speak for myself and the ACLU and every organization that litigated the marriage cases and Vostok.

I was counsel in Obergefell, which is the case that got gay marriage.

And I was also counsel in Vostok, the case that secured Title VII employment protections.

The ACLU was counsel in both, and all the same organizations that worked on each of these things were all part of these fights.

It did not, no new...

entity came in and drastically changed the contours of this very, by the way, conservative demand of legal equality.

And that's where I am, I'm operating in a very conservative way.

So that piece of it, I think, is important just as a, you know, in terms of who's been doing what and where.

And then the other thing is that everything that happens post-o-Bergefeld is, you know, in one sense, prompted by the right coming in, trying to undermine marriage and the non-discrimination protections that he hails as the right demand.

They're the ones who introduced the attacks on trans people to erode support, which he is now helping to facilitate on the very things that a lot of the people who are saying, oh, the movement used to be making the right asks.

Well, those things were under threat by the attacks on trans people, just as much as our rights as trans people are under attack.

Shall I keep going?

Yes, yes, I know.

We're never going to get through this if we keep talking.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Because we could.

But we got to keep going.

I'm dropping the British accent because people are just going to get annoyed with me.

So then he goes on to talk a little bit about how, despite, you know, the movement being over, in his opinion, after marriage was won, he talks about how a lot of LGBTQ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign continue to increase their annual funding.

And he writes, But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian, and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won.

It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution, focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with white supremacy.

They aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, not as a neutral fact of the human condition, but as a liberating ideological queerness, which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture, and society in a myriad of ways.

Okay, I know I have to keep reading, but it's like, this is only true in like a gender studies class at NYU.

Like, like,

okay, sorry, keep going, Matthew.

And then that was true in that gender studies class before marriage.

I mean, these, I, you know, I'm 42 years old.

That was like in my gender studies classes in the early 2000s before there was any of these successes.

So this is that is not new.

The words gay and lesbian all but disappeared.

LGBT became LGBTQ, then LGBTQ plus, and more letters and characters kept being added.

LGBTQIA plus or 2S LGBTQIA plus to include intersex, asexual people, and 2-spirit indigenous people.

The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and, by some counts, more than 70 new genders.

I want to know where he arrived at that number.

And the editors obviously like signed off on it.

yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were like, Yeah, 70 is good.

The point was that this is all one revolutionary intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes from Black Lives Matter to queers for Palestine.

I was uh I was annotating this essay as I read it, and this part I just wrote, like, uh,

it's

I just want to start with like the words gay and lesbian all but disappeared.

But this is why I get annoyed because it's like my dad, my straight dad, who has a great heart, heart of gold, but he reads this and he's like, really?

Are they not even allowed to say gay and lesbian anymore?

Do they have to use 2S LGBTQIA plus anytime?

It's like, no, that's not actually happening, dude.

And this, again, it's just, it's conflating all different things.

It's conflating the gender studies class with conversations people have, with people's personal preferences, with what we advocate for in law.

But I think if you take a step back, he also starts from this false premise that LGBT equality, even at its most baseline, had been won at some point, which he hasn't even named.

But it's also not true.

Because in 2020, it's when we get the Supreme Court to recognize that discrimination against LGBT people in employment is a form of prohibited sex discrimination.

But there is no federal law that explicitly prohibits discrimination against LGBT people.

For decades, we've been trying to pass a law and that the backlash has been continually escalating.

And so there's that all of these critiques, which are again ahistorical, dishonest, they're obscuring that his central point is just wrong.

We are still fighting for that equality.

I mean, so much of this, like we said up front, so much of this boils down to like the LGBTQ movement was over for Andrew Sullivan the second Andrew Sullivan like had a comfortable life.

I think that's literally what this comes down to.

And like, I talk about this type of argument all the time because there is a good amount of, I would say, majority cisgender, upper middle class white gay men who do think this way.

And I was actually at a party recently with someone who I know, someone who I like, who started to make this argument of just like, I just, I think we were doing well.

Like we were doing so well over the last decade.

And now I feel like we've just gone too far.

And of course, so much of that argument, and we're going to talk about this, completely just blames queer people for what's happening to queer people in America right now and does not acknowledge the very well-coordinated right-wing campaign that's been a Republican strategy over the last several decades, and especially over the last few years to, you know, kick up this whole groomer panic that we've seen all the dominoes fall down from.

But it's also just like this person that I was talking to was another sort of upper middle class white gay man who was like, I feel like we were doing so good and we got marriage equality.

And my thing is just like, why do you think that?

But so many people who don't look like you and don't have what you have don't think that.

Maybe you're actually just talking about yourself, you know, and it annoys me so much because it's like, and I wrote this when I was annotating this essay.

It's like, what did marriage equality do for like, for example, like young trans people who are doing sex work for survival and to like get their black market gender gender-affirming care because like they don't have access to more legitimate pathways to get that from doctors and

they don't have protection from job discrimination.

Like, what did marriage equality do for those people?

What did like Pete Buttigieg's representation do for those people?

I don't know.

Probably something different than what it did for you as an upper middle class white gay man, you know?

So it actually like makes sense that Andrew Sullivan thinks that we're good because like he's good.

Yeah, and I mean, I guess I would say, you know, I've thought about this a lot.

And,

you know, as someone who I am definitely was critical of the movement's emphasis on marriage and also saw the ways in which it changed what people believed to be possible at a young age.

And so I see that it was transformative, even if I didn't agree with every aspect of the movement emphasis on it.

And at the same time, what I think I want, especially want white cis gay men to understand is that

movements where you are a minority group in a society that oppresses you do not end.

And the fight persists because you have to keep fighting for your thing, even if we have different ideas of what that is.

I actually think that I've been fighting for Andrew Sullivan all this time.

He doesn't think so, and that's okay.

But the reality is that in 1954, when the Supreme Court decided Brown v.

Board of Education, racial segregation in school did not end.

It is a persistent problem that we live in in our society that we have to fight back against.

Obviously, you know, the right to access abortion was overturned.

These are movements that are forever that we have to fight against the consistent erosion of our rights.

And so we may have all different ideas of the tact to pursue.

We have all different ideas of what the priorities should be, but the idea that we can walk away is going to hurt us all.

Part of my job, a big part of my job, is trying to understand where people are at with their politics.

And a key part of understanding where they're at is understanding their information diet.

You know, a straightforward event can be, and often is, reported in a bunch of different ways depending on the ideological goals of the person who's reporting it.

For example, a group of people protesting outside of an elementary school drag queen story time could on one hand be reported as group of homophobic losers with no jobs linger outside an elementary school for three hours, while inside, fun person in Glitter and Rhinestones reads a group of happy kids Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Or it could be reported as, concerned warriors for children's safety bravely head to the front lines of battle.

This is where Ground News comes in.

Ground News is a website and an app that aggregates articles from all different publications about a single story and organizes them into left, right, and center leanings, gives you information about the owners of those publications and any potential conflicts of interest therein.

It also has so many other transparency tools that make it not only easier to understand your own information diet, but also like your dad's and the other people around you, and may give you more insights into why people, maybe along different ideological lines than you, are starting to think and perhaps go down the rabbit holes that they are.

For example, let's look at the coverage of Zoran Mamdani winning the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

On the left, we have Zoran Mamdani delivers stunning blow to billionaire-backed status quo in New York City.

And Democratic New York City mayor candidate Zoran Mamdani is pledging $65 million for trans healthcare.

Whereas on the right, we have anti-Israel progressive Momdani wins New York City Democratic primaries.

And it's over, Cuomo caved.

Communist candidate has pushed him aside.

Okay,

cool.

Ground news has been a really fascinating and honestly singular tool for me as someone who has spent a lot of time desperately trying to understand how fractured our shared reality has become, especially in the last few years as all of our information diets seem to be getting further and further away from one another.

Ground News is also purely subscriber funded.

It's ad-free and not backed by any venture capitalists, so it can keep its mission and have no allegiance to billionaires, unlike, I don't know, the New York Times.

If you would like to subscribe to Ground News, you can get 40% off a Vantage Plan right now at ground.news/slash fruity.

Or scan the QR code on the screen if you're watching the video episode.

That is ground.news/slash fruity.

Thank you so much to Ground News for being a very timely sponsor to this specific episode.

And now, let's get back to it.

Should we keep reading because he's about to get really petty?

I'm ready.

They needed a new banner for that.

So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new progress flag representing intersectional oppression.

Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow for black and brown people and the people lost during the AIDS crisis, and pink, light blue, and white for trans people.

That flag now demarcates not simply a place friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.

Queer was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement from the gay, lesbian, and transgender civil rights movement of the past.

It's a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once heard before being bashed in the head.

But one of the striking aspects of members of the the younger queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them.

I read this and I was just like, whoa,

we're doing flag discourse in the New York Times.

This can't be good.

The thing is, like, just like they're like, you can't even say gay or lesbian anymore.

It's like, go to any pride parade, Andrew Sullivan, which I know you don't because you probably think that they're like over the top and you're nothing like those faggots on the street.

But like, you will see any flag.

They are all there.

You can get the six color one.

You can get the 16 color one.

No one gives a shit.

It's like so much of this stuff focuses on like, I'm being oppressed by like one person who's like an autistic teenager and Tumblr in Iowa who uses neo-pronouns.

Like

Andrew Sullivan, you're fine.

Well, first of all, I am over 40.

So it's all and have been the subject of slurs since I've been little.

And so it's, this isn't like

special to have experienced violence and oppression it's horrible it's just we all get we can all respond in different ways but this suggestion that members of the young the younger queer generation like whatever that is um it is their disdain for those who came before them i mean every single thing i do is in honor of those who taught me and came before me um and that there are lots of different types of people who came before us there's not just one a um but b it's like we're also those of us who are trying to, you know, have a critical analysis at all times are following the tradition of Urbashi Bad, of Sylvia Rivera, of Miss Major, of Florian Borjas, of Flawless Sabrina.

That's who I live my life for.

So

I don't have disdain for people who came before me.

I am in debt every single day.

And Polly Murray is the person who I am most inspired by.

So I just, that, that's just not right.

Yeah.

You know, I was at Gender Liberation March in Washington, D.C., I can't remember, maybe like six months ago, maybe it was even a year ago at this point, but I remember I met Miss Major there, who is a black trans woman who has been, you know, doing LGBTQ movement work for so long.

And like she was there to support the gender liberation movement, which is a movement right now that is pushing for a much more radical freedom than, you know, Andrew Sullivan is, for example.

I don't have disdain for my queer elders.

Like

I have a little bit of disdain for Andrew Sullivan personally.

He's just describing a very specific type of elder, which is sort of a white gay man shaking his fist at the cloud kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, let's read to the next paragraph because I think he himself invokes such a thing.

Speaking of, quote, as I watched all this radical change, I wondered if I was just another old fart shaking my fist at the sky like every older generation known to man.

He's almost self-aware.

I appreciate that.

Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas and has moved on and old timers like me should just move aside?

And some of those changes are welcome.

The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for us all.

But then, as I told my friends, gay, trans, and everyone else, I'd always believed this and always supported trans civil rights.

Hold on, put a pin in that.

I was glad when, five years ago, the Supreme Court gave transgender people civil rights protection and employment.

I've also long lived in a gay world that is skewed left.

And along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I've made my peace with it or tried to.

Okay, I'm going to very quickly actually take the pin out of that because, no, actually,

you have not, as you say, always believed and always supported trans civil rights.

In fact, in 2007, you wrote how trans people should not be included in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Again, it's ahistorical, even down to a personal level.

I think that one of the things that's so difficult is that this, again, is just laundering dishonest histories, from one's personal history to movement history to history of this country.

And I think that unfortunately people, you know, want a simple to understand narrative of why the world looks the way it does.

I want a simple to understand narrative of why the world looks the way it does.

It's just that it isn't always so simple.

And a lot of times it requires uncovering really scary things about what we're up against.

It would be so much easier if I was to blame for this, because then I could just go away.

It would be so much easier if a few individuals made wrong tactical decisions because then we could shift course.

But the reality is that there is, you know, centuries of, you know, global power building towards the preservation of cisgender, heterosexual, nuclear family, you know, Christian supremacy that we're up against and that has been levied against our movements in the aftermath of every single success.

And so it isn't so simple as to just say, oh, if only the 1.4 million trans people had just behaved a little differently.

That, first of all, that's the same story that every movement gets, that every marginalized community gets, just be different and it would be better.

That's not true.

It's never true.

But also, I think it's part of our drive, in addition to adapt to power and align with power, it's part of our drive to have an easy story, a fixable story, but it just isn't going to be the case here.

Quote, but this new ideology, I believed, was different.

Like many gays and lesbians, and a majority of everybody else, I simply don't buy it.

I didn't and don't believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology.

My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women.

I'm attracted to the former and not the latter.

And now I'm supposed to believe that the difference doesn't exist?

I like put a huge, huge red flag in the sentence, I didn't didn't and don't believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology.

And it's like, wait, wait, do you believe trans people exist?

Like, what do you, what do you think being trans is?

And do you think that it's like okay to be trans?

Do you think it's real, right?

Yeah.

And also, like, what is he talking about?

Like, this invocation of biology is always this big red flag for me because I'm like, well, we, which part of our biology?

And what are you, what are you talking about?

Is it like, are you attracted to people's chromosomes?

Do you know?

Like, you know, it's like, you're like, do you have some sort of detector that's like, oh, XX, X, Y?

And by the way, there's lots of other chromosomal variations.

But this idea that biology breaks down into a simple binary.

And yes, I think for a lot of trans men and women, their identities as men and women has a lot to do with biology.

It has to do with how their secondary sex characteristics, how their body fat is distributed, how their muscle mass is distributed.

Those are biological, physiological characteristics that are very, very profoundly meaningful for a lot of cis cis and transgender people alike.

It's just that biology is, there's a lot of components to biology.

And I think this idea that, like, I actually, I'm not saying it has nothing to do with biology.

I'm just saying it is not solely and exclusively determined by XX and XY chromosomes, which is the suggestion that I think he's making.

Well, and it's so poorly written.

I didn't and don't believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology.

And it's like, well,

to your point, like, okay, well, what part of it is biology?

And what is biology?

And like, what are you talking?

What are you talking about?

Then what is it?

And who are you responding to?

Like, what is this?

What, like, who, who told you?

Like, like, this, it's all these like straw men because you're like, you're just fighting like these

ideas that sound like the thing that is most upsetting to people, but it's also not the thing that any of us are precisely saying.

It's so crazy because I was reading the New York Times comment section on this essay and there was a lot of pushback, but there was also a lot of people being like, finally, this should be required reading.

And I'm like, this is probably, if you feel that way, it's probably just reaffirming your own bigotry and lack of desire to like learn about anything because this is poorly written and these are poorly parsed out ideas.

And I also just want to add, to anyone who says like, my sexual attraction, whether it's homosexuality, heterosexuality, what have you, is based in biology.

It's chromosomal.

And I'm like, well, that's just not how attraction works.

Google a picture of Hunter Schaefer and Google a picture of Laith Ashley or any number of trans women and men and tell me that your attraction and that your understanding of your own sexuality is based not on what you see, not on what you instinctually feel when you look at someone, but on chromosomes.

You're lying to yourself.

You're lying.

What are you talking about?

Yeah, I just, I think that we just have to accept that it is more complicated than that.

And I just don't know what would be so scary about accepting that reality, but I do think that a lot of these very, very strong aversions to trans people and to frankly to access to gender-affirming medical care at a young age is this idea that all of a sudden our attractions might be to people in a way that we were not suspecting.

And there's deep anxiety about that in a society that has deep anxiety about sexual attraction and desire.

Quote, I'm more than happy to accept that there are some people, not all that many, who don't fit in that binary and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are.

And I'm with them all the way.

I'm not so sure you are.

After all, I too am part of a minority.

Most people live their lives governed by heterosexual desires.

Thanks to the gay and lesbian movement, I'm not being asked to.

So here I highlighted,

I'm more than happy to accept that there are some people, not all that many, who are non-binary.

And it's like, whoa,

you do not decide if you're non-binary.

Andrew Sullivan does.

Like, again, so many people were like, this is such a moving, powerful, must-read essay.

And it's like, what?

Yeah.

And here, I'm not even sure.

I mean, I think he's referring to people who are trans

all together.

I don't know.

I mean, I think there's just a lot of slippages here.

And the analysis is meant to be unclear and tap into people's reflexive New York Times cultivated anxiety about transness.

But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society, that's a whole other thing entirely.

And madness, I believe.

What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people or changed what it means to be a man or a woman for that matter?

Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a society-wide revolution in overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash against not just trans people, but gay men and lesbians as well.

Can I just say this whole thing is just like one long J.K.

Rowling tweet?

I mean, the other thing is that we have, like, I really, I'm a big fan of just like taking a step back for a second because, first of all, I mean, certainly as a lawyer, the last thing I'm doing is abolishing the sex binary for the entire society.

If anything, I'm reinforcing it in ways that, you know, are probably unfortunate.

But this is exactly what's been said about every movement.

You know, when women demanded to, you know, work outside the home, it was seen as abolishing the sex binary for everyone, as making a revolutionary demand that society change.

It wasn't just about what it meant for the women, it was what it meant for men.

Every demand for inclusion and equality, even the most basic for a group, have been exactly framed as this: as demanding society change.

If black people and white people are going to go to school together, that is not equality.

That's transforming society.

If people can marry someone of a different race, that's going to create a totally different society.

If gay people can get married, that is not just equality, that is transforming society and demanding that everyone go along.

So, again, let's not exceptionalize this critique.

It's old and consistent across history and i want to add here that like as someone who does talk about queer issues and lefty politics to a large audience online i'm aware of optics i understand that there's a lot of people who think the way that andrew sullivan is writing in this pair in this essay and that regardless of how they got there it matters that I'm able to change their mind or offer them something different.

And it matters that someone like my dad could be very susceptible to adopting this style of thinking from Andrew Sullivan and thinking that these wild statements like you'll be crucified if you use the regular rainbow flag or you can't even say that gender exists anymore because everything's so radical and whatever.

I guess my question is for the people who are starting to adopt that mindset, I guess I just want to ask, did you hear those things from a trans person?

Did you hear those things from someone who believes that you, that it's homophobic to fly the wrong flag or that you'll be killed if you use the wrong pronoun by accident?

Or did you hear it from Andrew Sullivan or someone on Fox News?

Did you hear it from a fear monger?

Did you hear it from an actual person claiming it earnestly?

You know what I mean?

I just, again, it's this conflating of all of all different things.

It's sort of taking a tweet and saying this is the entire movement's objective and suggesting that the demands we make in court are the same as the, you know, things we say with our friends.

And that a lot is being taken out of context.

And I come from a conservative family.

I go travel all over the country.

I have all different types of conversations all the time and believe in it fully and have people in my life who think all different things.

This idea that there's one way that we're all moving or one thing that the movement is trying to do that's really scary is a product of the way in which movements are always discredited.

It's a tale as old as time.

Every movement has been sort of cast as too much, too extreme, moving too fast.

And so I think we have to ask ourselves, who's telling us that and why?

Quote, the gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple, liberal equality and mutual respect.

Live and let live.

Reform, not revolution.

No one's straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged.

You can bring up your children however you like.

We will leave you alone.

We will leave your children alone.

I don't know.

I guess die young or

grow old enough to see yourself become Anita Bryant, right?

I mean, I think that's, yeah, there you go.

And again, I just want to say that it was seen as revolution to demand marriage equality.

So this is not, oh, it was such a simple, you know, demand of, you know, liberal equality and mutual respect.

I mean, one could say the same thing thing about trans people accessing healthcare.

We're just asking for equality and mutual respect.

Our accessing healthcare doesn't change anything about anyone else.

We're just asking to go to the bathroom at school, at work.

It doesn't affect you.

You're not, you don't have to be with us, like in our little bathroom stall or at the urinal.

It just, our existence is not actually changing yours.

Your perception that it does is your choice, just as the idea that gay people getting married was changing the nature of marriage was someone else's choice about how to cast the marriage.

So again, you can put every single one of these things is either revolution or demand for liberal equality.

It's a choice how you cast it.

Also, and again, just ahistorical, you know, this idea, he says that the gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, was all about reform, not revolution.

One of my favorite old sort of vintage gay protest photos is this one that I'm going to throw up on the screen if you're watching the video episode, but it's from San Francisco Pride in 1990, and it is a group of people holding up a sign that says, no apologies, no assimilation.

And in front of it is this queen in heels voting down on the ground.

It's just a fabulous image.

And it's one that I think Andrew Sullivan could benefit from seeing.

Quote, but in the wake of victory, LGBTQ groups reneged on that pledge.

They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted.

Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies, and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born.

In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth.

It was now merely assigned, penciled in.

We got new terms like chest feeding for breastfeeding and birthing parent for mother.

You can't even say mother anymore.

Exactly.

It's like we all say mother, we all say breastfeeding, you know, and the reality is that some people use different words for themselves.

And again, that is not a demand that other people change how they are operating in their own lives.

This sense that, you know, the fact that a trans dad exists and gave birth to his child, it doesn't actually affect anyone else.

You can make it affect you by getting very agitated about it.

They love to lean into, and when I say they, I just mean conservatives, because that's ultimately like all this is, despite being published by a gay man, despite being in the New York Times, like this is just like a conservative screed.

They always do this, like, it's, it's leaning into the like, your kid could go to school and come home transgender.

And it's like,

I've like talked to like teachers in California and they're like, I am in the most liberal district in the country.

And like, we're not doing what they pretend that we're doing.

But it really, it's the same thing Anita Bryant did.

She said, we can't have gay teachers in schools because they're preying on your children and they're going to turn them into homosexuals.

Yeah.

I mean, again, this

idea is entirely not new.

It's the way that, you know, the movement against LGBT people has always centered the risk to children of proximity to queerness.

It's Anita Bryant Save the Children campaign.

It's just being repackaged.

We're so back.

The 70s has never been back.

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And now let's get back to the episode.

Chase, do you want to take the next paragraph?

Because I fear you are about to be invoked.

I fear it too.

I fear it too.

A key leader of this movement, Chase Drandio, informed us that, quote, a penis is not a male body part.

It's just an unusual body part for a woman, end quote.

We all were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn't already know.

Then neo-pronouns, z, zem, were added.

The movement came up with a mantra, trans women are women, trans men are men.

It was not an argument or a proposition to be explored or debated.

It was a theological command, in all caps.

Was there any debate among gays and lesbians about this profound change, change, a vote taken, or even a poll of gay men and lesbians?

None that I can find or recall.

Okay, this is all you.

So I just want to say at the top, the quote of mine supposedly is referring back to a different New York Times article and to two unnamed sources who seem to remember exactly what I said in a meeting in 2016.

I also think that whatever I did or didn't say, I certainly don't remember,

to be perfectly honest, because it was 2016.

I also think what we say in meetings when we're having what we should be having, which is robust debate about anything, is not the same as a movement command.

And it certainly is not the same as a public command on how other people live or act.

And I think one thing that's been repeated over time is this idea that a challenge to some way in which we're talking is demand that other people change everything about their lives.

But instead, it could just as easily be understood, as I think it should be, as us asking questions about what it is that we're doing and saying and how it affects others.

That is one part of this project.

And the reality is that in 2016, North Carolina became the first state to codify in law.

quote-unquote biological sex.

There was no notion of biological sex in law.

There was just sex.

And sex had a lot of different meanings in law, just as it does in medicine.

And the invocation of this biological sex construct as a legal matter emerged solely and exclusively to exclude trans people from legal protections.

This entire reference to the Slate article from 2016, to the meeting I was in, was about contending with this new paradigm of using the term biological sex as a legal term to target transgender people, which emerged in 2016.

It was not an organic legal concept that was imported from England and common law and then was persistent through the centuries.

It's a 2016 concept that emerges as part of the backlash to Obergofell and with the goal of not just targeting trans people, but undermining marriage equality and protections for LGBT people.

And I just want to emphasize before we move on that this is another one of the things just like you can't even say this anymore and that anymore.

Conservatives love to do like and the neo pronouns.

Look, I'm always going to call someone what they want to be called.

I really just like don't care and it does not impose anything in my life.

Like, and if you feel like the biggest issue in your life is someone asking you to use their pronouns, I'm very happy for you that you don't have many issues.

But also, I want to know a single person in Andrew Sullivan's life that has asked him to use neo-pronouns for them.

I just don't believe he knows any.

I know one.

Yeah, and I didn't even know what a neo pronoun was.

So.

And if Chase Strangier doesn't know, then Andrew Sullivan.

She does, which means that, yes, and I too will use whatever people ask me.

But

again, I live a very trans life and this has not come up for me.

Quote, as in other other social justice spaces, dissent was equated with bigotry.

Dissenters from gender ideology,

dissenters from gender ideology,

are routinely unfriended, shunned, and shamed.

Almost all of the gay men, trans people, and lesbians who have confided in me that they don't agree with this or think that J.K.

Rowling and Martina Navratilova have some good points have said so, Soto Voce.

I feel like that's an Italian expression.

I don't know it.

I'm sorry.

Less to anyone over here.

That's the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian, and transgender space.

This little community used to champion all manner of expression or argument or speech, eccentrics and visionaries.

Now it's fearful, self-centered, and extremely uptight.

Debate has been all but snuffed out.

Total uniformity of thought is demanded.

I mean, this, again, this just is not true.

I mean, even just the framing, it sort of suggests that there's this thing called gender ideology, and then there's things that there are people dissenting from it.

But first of all, we are not a gender ideology.

Gender ideology is a right-wing criticism of trans existence and advocacy.

So I think we need to be really clear that, you know, when you're casting something as gender ideology, when what we're talking about is just trans people existing and not asking anything of you, that, you know, I think that should raise some alarms.

But I guess the question is, who are we supposed to be talking to?

And what does it mean to compromise and allow for dissenting voices?

Because I listen and compromise every single day of my life.

I've been at the ACLU for 13 years that we have made incredibly, you know, modest, conservative demands that in this article they are celebrated.

Marriage equality, inclusion within Title VII, access to healthcare for trans people, ability to go to school without discrimination.

And that is being cast as extreme and imposing upon others.

And I think that we're caricatured when we are, you know, really open-minded.

I mean, I've actually tried to engage with some of the people on that list and have not been met with a very hospitable openness to engagement.

And my experience has been when I am open to engagement and compromise, I met with extremism and categorical bans on healthcare, sports, restrooms.

It's also just interesting because he's like, well, what happens if you agree with a little bit of what J.K.

Rowling is saying?

And I'm like, well, can we be a little bit specific about which thing you're agreeing with?

Because like J.K.

Rowling doesn't think trans people exist.

J.K.

Rowling thinks trans women are predatory men who want access to, you know, women's bathrooms and changing rooms.

So what exactly are you agreeing with her on?

And again, it's just like the premise of this article is like, we all want equality.

We all want lives with dignity and happiness.

You're just going about it the wrong way.

And I'm like, well, but if you agree with some of the things that J.K.

Rowling is saying about trans people, Andrew Sullivan, then I don't think we want the same thing.

I don't think we're on the same page at all.

I feel this way with like Bill Maher too.

Bill Maher will always be like, I'm a liberal, but you know, the way that the liberals today have gone about it is, and I'm like, you could just be a Republican.

Like you could just be a conservative.

You can just even just like self-identify as a white supremacist instead of speaking over these movements that you're not actually a part of or invested in the success of.

I will also add, it's very funny in this tangent about like

the tolerant left, not so tolerant after all.

What about if you agree agree with Martina Navratilova?

Well, Martina Navratilova blocked me on Twitter, despite there being no interaction history between us ever.

So I don't know.

Maybe Martina Navratilova should be a little bit more tolerant of Matt Bernstein.

Quote.

Whatever happened to the tolerant Martina Navratilova?

I will say, back when I was on Twitter, she blocked me too.

And I also never engaged with that.

I loved her and was devastated.

And I did sort of try to appeal to people's sense of equality and decency, but she blocked me.

But this illiberalism made a fateful strategic mistake.

In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule.

Leave children out of it.

We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us, that we groom and abuse kids.

You can bring up your children however you like, we promised.

We will leave you alone.

We will leave your children alone.

So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do?

They focused almost entirely on children and minors.

Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it.

They'd been resolved or close to it.

And partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young.

It meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.

Here I just want to highlight, and I want your take on this, and every conservative repeats this, but the idea that it was like the queer movement that decided to make it all about kids.

Like we started this.

Yeah, so I think this is incredibly important.

Well, there's a few things to correct, and I'll start there.

And we did not quote unquote make it all about kids.

And in fact, all of this discourse about kids was part of what the the opposition introduced when we tried to do the thing that Andrew Sullivan told us to do, which is pass non-discrimination protection.

So, right after Obergofell, if you look at the moments when this focus on bathrooms and sports takes hold, it's upon a vote on a non-discrimination ordinance in Houston, just simple civil rights protections, liberal demands for equality, and in Charlotte, North Carolina, that results in HB2, the bathroom ban across the state.

And from there, because of the sort of success of the rhetoric, trans kids in schools are the thing that become the focal point of the opposition in an effort to undermine civil rights protections for LGBT people.

The movement did not

put kids into the conversation.

That this was a way in which our opposition was trying to undermine the successes that we were having.

And when we tried to just divert attention from them, we lost even more catastrophically.

And it was an unsuccessful opposition strategy, and we lost the non-discrimination protections.

So that's number one.

But another thing to keep in mind is that the quote-unquote gay rights movement also had to contend with questions about children.

That was, in fact, the central opposition.

to marriage equality.

And I know because I spent 12 years of my life litigating marriage cases.

And the entire conversation in those cases and the justification for the bans was that it wasn't good for children to be raised by same-sex couples.

And the entire conversation turned on the welfare of children and having conversations about children.

And at the same time, we affirmatively were making demands for gay and lesbian people specifically to adopt children in states that had bans on such adoption.

The first case that I worked on at the ACLU was one of the last bans on gay and lesbian people being foster parents in Nebraska.

All of that to say is it's not true that this never came up in the gay rights advocacy that Andrew Sullivan focuses on as sort of the model

and it's also not true in the context of trans advocacy that lgbt people and this the movement put kids in the center they were put in the center um but we had an obligation to preserve the equality demands we were making to fight back and to protect the young people and the last thing i'll say about the parents here is that in this context it is the cisgender mostly cisgender parents of trans kids who are having their decisions about their own children overridden by the government when it comes to the medical care decisions that it's the parents whose consent is being overridden by the government.

You're just

a wealth of history and knowledge.

Chase or Angio, you are one of one.

No, but

I was here.

I was here for all of it.

Quote, kids all over the country were affected.

Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will.

Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl, in parentheses, a biological male, in athletics.

Children in elementary schools got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents' knowledge or permission.

I suppose there are other ways you can resurrect the ghost of Anita Bryan and all the homophobic paranoia that followed her, but this will probably do the trick.

Well, at least you're self-aware about the fact that you've basically just become Anita Bryant.

The thing that I noted here was just like, and this is so much of the coverage of Trans People in the New York Times, it's so much of like your child and there's children everywhere being harmed.

And it's like, but okay, but there are no examples provided of children being harmed by this alleged overreach of the gender revolution in school.

Like, what are you talking about?

Why do you not cite a single source?

Yeah, what is it?

And a lot of times it's the same fear marketing, this idea that parents don't or won't know their children.

And I'll say as a parent, I really do want my child to find adults

that they feel safe with at school that aren't me.

I mean, think about in my generation and older, especially, but I'm sure now too, all over the country, that having supportive adults in schools is a hammer for many people for many different reasons, including exploring their identities, which they are going to do.

And with a trusted adult at school, is probably one of the healthier ways they could do that.

And what what this is, is this fear-mongering about parents losing control of their children, but that's just part of parenting.

We lose control of our children, and our job is to provide safe environments for them to find safe outlooks and not think that we're the only ones that are going to be the available adults to be there for them.

But there's a lot of fear mongering.

It's tapping into deep-seated anxieties that are real, but the specter of harm is not.

I

just remembered this.

When I was 15, I came out to my health teacher at the time before I came out to my family.

She was kind of weird about it, but that was like a personal thing for her.

It wasn't quite the like big hug that I was hoping it would be, but it was, you know, good for me.

I saw something on Twitter recently.

Someone was just like, the belief that children are their own human beings is like a radical left belief.

And I sometimes feel that that's true when I see the way that these conservative people talk about children essentially just being property.

How dare you go by a different name at school?

Like, that's not how I, you know, whipped you into being.

Quote, and then the most radical of all, gender-affirming care for minors, which can lead to irreversible sex changes for children.

The quote-unquote care included off-label blockers to arrest puberty, almost always followed with cross-sex hormones.

To begin with, gays and lesbians, including me, empathized with kids with gender dysphoria and trusted the medical profession with the rest.

If this helped kids or even saved their lives, as was often emphasized, what business was it of mine?

If transitioning this young in life helped some pass better as adults, good for them.

Still, questions lingered, drawn from my own life.

As a child, uninterested in playing team sport, but very interested in the boys who played team sports, I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, are you sure you're not really a girl?

Of course not, I replied.

But I wonder how I might have responded if someone in authority, a parent or a teacher or a doctor, had suggested that my difference and occasional anxiety was because I was, in fact, a girl, that my body was irrelevant, and that I could choose to be the opposite sex before puberty and all my confusion would disappear.

I just don't know what I would have said or done, to be honest.

This is where it's like actually just literally what Anita Bryant was doing in the 1970s, which if you don't know and you haven't listened to this podcast a lot, because I do talk about Anita Bryant all the time, she was basically this anti-gay activist who was like, there are gay teachers in the schools like proposing homosexuality to your young children and they're falling for it and we must get the gay teachers out of the schools.

This is just that.

It's a fantasy he's describing where teachers are like, hey, hey, did you know you could just be transgender if you wanted?

Like it's just not happening.

Yeah, it's just not happening.

And it's doing this insidious thing, which I think is really important to debunk, which is suggesting that

transness transness and the experience of trans kids is just gender non-conformity in the ways that we all have experienced it.

Because every person has had moments of gender nonconformity.

That's just the way it is, including, as Andrea Sullivan and many other, you know, gay men have referenced, a lot of gay people.

But knowing a lot and having worked with a lot of young trans kids who have no contact with other trans people often and have a persistent and consistent insistence of who they are are that is different than what their sex assigned at birth was.

It is not just a casual, I don't like to play team sports.

And so when we are,

you know, sort of conflating those two things and also adding on top of it the lie that there's all these teachers and doctors being like, you know, it would be good for you if you just became the opposite sex.

It's tapping into people's fears that their non-trans kid could be turned trans.

And that is exactly what the same fears that Anita Bryant tapped into.

But the reality is that in the same way that just a bunch of gay people existed with straight parents and no other gay people around them, that's true for trans people as well.

And it's not, this is not the, this is not the story that's accurate.

It's one that's designed to tap into people's anxieties.

Quote, and how do today's parents, teachers, and doctors know for sure that a 10-year-old child isn't, well, like me, and really is trans?

How can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn't instead a manifestation of being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it?

Like I said,

he's been really on this for a long time that like trans people are actually just confused gay people, which is also something J.K.

Rowling does.

How do they know for sure there isn't another complicating personal or psychological factor?

I was told not to worry, a child had to demonstrate a persistent, consistent, and insistent trans identity for years, even to be considered for medical intervention.

But this, I found out, was no longer true.

The whole point of the new regime of gender-affirming care, I love how he talks about it, like it's like a powerful cabal, they all do this, was that it rejected broad mental health assessments of children that could ensure that mistakes really didn't happen.

The old persistent, consistent, and insistent model was deemed transphobic and loosened to become an affirmation policy.

As soon as the kid said he or she was the opposite sex, further counseling and mental health exploration was deemed problematic because it amounted to transphobic conversion therapy, we were told.

When I said that seemed crazy and surely we needed more safeguards, I was sternly told, children know who they are.

Of course, no citation on that quote.

Again, it's just like kids can go to candy shops now and they just can

buy hormones over the counter with their Tic Tacs.

It's like, what, what, in what world?

Again, this is a total distortion cast as, you know, some story of the provision of care.

There's no links here.

There's no references.

I don't honestly know what he's talking about.

The reality is, is that there are robust evaluations that happen when we're talking about minors.

And

the reality, too, is that by the time a parent even brings a child in, there has usually been a very long period

of some amount of consistent distress that the child has been showing.

So then you not only have that long period before you even see a provider, the requirement remains.

I do not know where this idea is coming from that people are saying it's quote unquote transphobic, that all providers of care that I'm aware of require a mental health evaluation and diagnosis.

And the diagnostic process requires that you assess other co-occurring conditions, including ones that may interfere with a proper diagnosis.

There's not, you say who you are and you get access to medical care.

That just is simply not how it happens.

And again, a lot of people don't have access to this care.

The other thing is almost nobody has access to the puberty blocking care.

And so this idea that there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of trans people accessing puberty blockers, I think there was a study that suggested that there are around 4,000 minors in the United States receiving puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.

We live in a very large country.

That is a very, very small number of people.

It's like the same as the number of trans athletes is like four, but people think it's 40,000 because we're getting this

consistent misinformation that is creating this outsized sense of the population and the medical care or the participation in athletics.

And the the care is difficult to access.

The care requires a huge amount of mental health oversight.

How does the New York Times just publish this?

How did it like it's it's it is I think it is akin to journalistic malpractice.

It is it is a lie and it's so vague and it's so unsourced that this entire essay is just like vibes based.

But the product, of course, is real bigotry.

and real opposition among broad swaths of, especially the American readership of the New York Times, to trans people.

And the reality is, is that in our litigation and in legislative advocacy, the state legislatures and federal courts cite to the New York Times as experts on medical care for trans people more than they cite to our experts who have testified in the case and to the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics.

We have to really think about this in the context of a very anti-science moment in this country.

And that by laundering this sense that the expertise on science can just be whoever has an idea that feels very strong, overrides

a medical community-studied opinion, is how you get to RFK as the HHS secretary.

And we have to see this as part and parcel to an attack on science, this idea that there's a conspiratorial nature to medical opinion.

And that came

through the pandemic.

It came through attacks on abortion.

It came through attacks on medical care for trans people.

And now, you know, we're seeing the doubts on, you know, the efforts to make people fearful of vaccines.

And a lot of this idea of, oh, now there's all these kids who are X, Y, or Z, it's not unique actually to trans identity.

I mean, that's what people are saying about ADHD, about autism.

And they're doing it in ways that allow for increasingly discriminatory policy choices to be made.

Quote, but do kids know who they are when they are between 9 and 13?

I sure didn't.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan.

But do kids know who they are when they're between 9 and 13?

I sure didn't.

Does any parent really believe this?

Solid, long-term data on how many children transition but decide later it was a mistake is hard to find, in large part because the procedures are relatively new and the studies have very poor follow-up, which is why I'm supporting the party that's defunding all of the research around these topics that I allegedly care so much about.

But without a doubt, there are some who regret it.

They're walking around today, testifying in courts and legislatures, opining all over the web, telling similar stories of rushed judgments, minimal safeguards, inadequate gatekeeping, and agonizing regret that, as children, they made irreversible decisions that they could not meaningfully consent to.

I have met many, and they break your heart.

They're not cited here.

And so many of the gender dysphoric kids are gay and lesbian.

He always comes back to this, like, all the gay kids are becoming trans.

He's been doing this since 2019.

Of course they are.

And there are many more children who.

Of course they are.

I love how much of this is just like Andrew Sullivan gets to decide what your sexual and gender identity is.

Oh, Matthew.

Of course they are.

And there are many more children who will grow up to be gay and lesbian than who will grow up to be trans.

Andrew Sullivan has met many detransitioners who will break your heart.

They're not mentioned here, though.

Yeah, I mean, and again, I think it's really important to, I just want to say a few things.

I am a parent,

and I do think that

your child knows a lot about themselves between the ages of nine and 13.

Distinct from you, they are consolidating their identity as independent.

And I think that we should recognize the autonomy of young people.

And at the same time, when we're talking about persistent trans identities, they are not these flip, I don't like to play team sports or I don't like to wear dresses.

It is very, very different.

And so I think there's that piece of it.

We do not want to discount

the way in which trans identity shows up in young people.

We don't want to diminish the agency of young people.

And we also don't want to dismiss parents as not believing in their children.

children's understanding of themselves.

I certainly believe in my child's ability to know all sorts of things that I don't know.

And my kid has all sorts of interests that are not in any way my aligned interests and

sort of neurobiological components that are just different.

That's just that that is the way it goes.

I think it's important to reinforce that.

But there is a lot of solid long-term follow-up data.

And this is another thing that we hear consistently in the critiques is that this is too new and there's not a lot of data.

Well, guess what?

There's a lot more data than we have about a lot of other pediatric interventions that we do prescribe very readily.

And so the lack of context, the lack of information that the reader is being provided about all other forms of pediatric medicine, other examples of regret.

It's just the lack of comparison makes the problem that they present seem outsized and significant when regret is part of everything.

Lack of long-term data and pediatric medicine is part of everything, but it's actually not more severe and is, in fact, better the data that we have here and in many other contexts.

And I notice a pattern that so many sort of anti-trans advocates, which I am going to say at this point in the essay that Andrew Sullivan seems to be, they do this a lot where they're like, when I was growing up, I had questions about my gender, but I didn't turn out to be trans.

Well, it's like, but maybe you didn't pursue that further because you're not trans.

And maybe you weren't dysphoric about your gender.

And like, maybe you can't just map map your own experience onto young trans kids who are seeking medical interventions or trans adults for that matter.

Like J.K.

Rowling did this too, where she wrote in her 2020 famous essay, Turf Wars, she wrote about how like she was a tomboy.

And like, well, what if she had been trans?

And it's like, well, that doesn't happen.

And also, like, maybe the reason you can't relate to trans people is because you're not trans.

I don't even know what to say.

Like, maybe it's just not about you and you're feeling.

I mean, so much of Andrew Sullivan's work around this stuff and his writing is just like, well, I just turned out to be gay.

And so I feel like a lot of people claiming to be trans will turn out to be gay.

And it's like, okay, but you also never claimed to be trans.

Like, this is just, this is just not about you.

Quote, it's easy to see that one way to cure yourself of attraction to the same sex is to become the opposite one.

At Britain's now shuttered Tavistock Clinic, according to the investigative journalist Hannah Barnes, staff members had a dark joke that at the rate they were going, there would be, quote, no gay people left.

This is why sex change surgeries are permitted and even subsidized in Iran.

It's a way to rid the country of gay people.

Oh, brother.

Chase, do you mind if I go on this one just for a moment?

Go for it, please.

Because the invocation of the queer rights situation in Iran here, I think, is so egregious.

So Iran has a very specific kind of confusing stance towards gay and trans people.

I think especially if you live in somewhere like the United States, that I am going to try to explain to the best of my ability.

Basically, gay relations are criminalized in Iran, but trans identities are legally recognized if a trans person goes through with sex reassignment surgery.

And this is the product of a 1980s interpretation of Islamic law, which rejects homosexuality, but accepts the idea that a soul can be trapped in the wrong body.

So you can legally exist as a medicalized trans person in Iran, but not as a cisgender gay person, which according to very, very sparse writing, leads to some cisgender gay people, especially ones who don't conform to, you know, hegemonic ideals of gender, feeling pressure to transition so as to maintain a heterosexual identity.

This comes obviously with the caveat that trans people are still not treated very well, and discrimination towards trans people in Iran is very prevalent, just like it is in a lot of other countries, including this one.

But, like, I bring this all up to say this is so genuinely complicated, and it's an attitude towards sex and gender rooted in a theocracy that doesn't neatly map onto the situation in the United States at all.

And so, for Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times to add this as like a throwaway comment, implying that American teenagers would transition to avoid identifying as gay is, again, it's like psychotic and it's also just, it's like journalistic malpractice.

And I mean, I will say in litigating these cases, challenging these bans on behalf of families, this argument is, you know, at least impliedly asserted often.

The idea that the young people are just avoiding rampant homophobia and becoming trans.

Which is way easier in the U.S.

Like, what?

Astounding argument to present because trans kids experience unbelievable rates of bullying, discrimination, and entire legal paradigms to exclude them.

And it has never held water for a single judge, as far as I'm aware, but is

sort of consistently invoked in litigation and obviously here in public discourse.

Quote, and a fix for gender dysphoria for gay and lesbian kids may be puberty itself, as it was for me and many of my gay male friends.

Once my hormones kicked in, my anxieties evaporated.

I loved being a boy, I realized.

Puberty blockers literally block gay and lesbian kids from the chance at that possible resolution of their gender dysphoria.

There is a real conflict here, and it's obscured by the LGBTQ identity.

And it's like, well, wait, Andrew Sullivan, you didn't describe having gender dysphoria.

You described not wanting to play team sports.

Yeah, and this, again, is just a lot of misinformation because, first of all, puberty blockers don't, aren't prescribed until after the onset of puberty.

So a child has to reach puberty and then the blocker

is prescribed and puberty is paused.

But I also want to be clear here that the young people who end up on a pubertal suppressant at the time of the onset of puberty are the young people who started insisting that they were a different gender at age like two consistently because they're the ones who are already under medical supervision, who are already experiencing this dire fear of puberty, because unlike Andrew Sullivan, they aren't super excited to be a boy.

And the manifestation of their gender dysphoria is not just gender atypical behavior.

It is a deep, strong, abiding sense of who they are that is reflected over and over.

And once again, there are about 4,000 people in the United States on puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, an exceedingly small number.

And the overwhelming majority of trans adolescents never have access to or see a doctor in time to receive puberty blockers.

I didn't even realize it was that low.

And I'm like steeped in this.

It's very low.

And again, I just wrote here, he was like,

I loved being a boy.

I realized.

I just annotated, I'm happy for you, Andrew Sullivan.

But, you know, it's like, well, okay, what about people who aren't Andrew Sullivan?

He seems to be tiptoeing around his actual belief, which is that like trans kids don't exist.

And if they do exist, their validity is established not by them or their therapists or their doctors, but on a case-by-case basis by Andrew Sullivan himself.

And also, I just so I just want to say, I just went and looked and to confirm 926 adolescents with a gender-related diagnosis received puberty blockers from 2018 through 2022.

0.1%.

Let's give him another round of guess essays in the New York Times.

What are we talking about?

Exactly.

928 in a five-year period.

928.

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Quote, we were also told repeatedly that transitioning children, he does that like transition as like a.

Yes, a verb, like someone is doing it to them.

Exactly, like they're a passive participant in their own transition.

We were also told repeatedly that transitioning children was drastic, but that the alternative could be that they would commit suicide.

We often ask parents, would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?

Joanna Olson Kennedy, a vocal advocate of these treatments, told ABC News in 2011.

But even the ACLU's Mr.

Strangio admitted, eh, Chase invoked, when arguing before the Supreme Court last year, that suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.

In one study from Britain, of some 15,000 adolescents referred for gender care over a decade, there were four likely or confirmed suicides, two who had been seen and two who had not.

One suicide is awful, and suicidality is real among kids with gender dysphoria.

But that doesn't mean that suicide is what will happen if you don't transition a child.

So first of all, this idea, again, I think we have to challenge the idea that this is being done to young people.

The use of children is deliberately designed to make people think of very young children.

And of course, these are adolescents who have already started puberty, which is different than children when it comes to medicine.

The reality is that completed suicide as a data point in all for you know for trans people and otherwise is rare.

It's statistically rare.

And so if you have a study and what I was talking about with Justice Alito

at the United States Supreme Court was that yes, completed suicide is rare.

It just is.

That is a statistical fact.

And so you're not going to get statistical data comparing completed suicides in two different groups of people.

You probably and hopefully don't get a completed suicide in your study at all.

And then what the rest of that conversation with Justice Salito explained was that, however, what you do know is that these medications reduce depression, anxiety, and suicidality, which is rampant in this population.

And all of those are indicators of potential completed suicide.

And so what you are reducing and what statistically you can show is reductions in suicidality, depression, and anxiety, which I would think we could all agree are good things to reduce, even if you don't have a bunch of people in your study who have completed suicide, thankfully.

And then the other thing I think it's important to know is that when we talk about life-saving, especially, a lot of times we are not saying we would be dead by suicide definitively without this medical care because it's impossible to know for many of us.

But we certainly wouldn't be alive in the way that we are.

We wouldn't be able to exist in the world.

We wouldn't be able to have the jobs that we have.

I would not be able to go to the United States Supreme Court and argue on behalf of my community without this care.

I wouldn't be able to be a father.

I wouldn't be able to be a partner in the way that I think I'm able to be because of this care.

It has saved my life by giving me this life.

And that is important.

And that matters.

And that is transformative.

And then the other thing is trans people die not just by suicide.

We die because we are underemployed, because we face discrimination, and because we have poor health outcomes because of all of those things, because we don't treat ourselves well, whether it's drug use, eating disorders, other things, when we can't have access to the medical care that we need.

And so, this myopic focus on studies that have completed suicide measures, which almost no studies do of any condition, is a way to try to devalue the benefits.

of this care repeatedly.

And what I annotated when I read this was just like, okay, so we know that this type of gender affirming care greatly improves the lives of young trans kids and that banning it as is what's being done now would prevent their lives from being improved in that way.

And what he's basically saying is like, but they wouldn't kill themselves, but they wouldn't kill themselves necessarily.

Quote, it's a horrible reversal of history.

For so long, First Amendment rights were the primary constitutional rights gays and lesbians could fully and regularly exercise, and we treasured them.

If censorship was in the air, gay men and lesbians were the first to oppose it.

What?

We knew who was shut up first when it came to shutting people up, and we knew we would always be a small minority.

The idea that we would tell other people what words they can use, shut down speakers, criticize journalists, and threaten others into silence was once absurd.

Yet these are now the signature tools of the LGBTQ movement.

They do not seek to engage or persuade opponents.

They seek to demonize, bully, or worse, cancel them.

People get annoyed because when I laugh like that, my audio peaks.

I'm so sorry, you guys.

I love it.

I love it.

I love when you laugh like that.

It's just, it's so crazy.

Like, what if Andrew Sullivan, like, what would he have been saying during the AIDS crisis?

I mean, were we canceling Ronald Reagan?

Did we cancel Anita Bryant during the orange juice boycott?

Like, it's all in the eye of the beholder, but criticism is in cancellation.

It's also just like, I'm being canceled, I say, as I write my guest essay to be published in the United States Paper of Record.

With the push notifications.

Yes, I don't think I added this at the front of the episode, but the New York Times app sent a push notification out for this guest essay when it was published, which is not something they do very often for guest essays.

It's very much giving that, you know, that clip where she's like, conservative voices are being silenced.

Look, the fact which doesn't care about your feelings is that online and in the media, conservative voices are being silenced.

I've said this before.

I said it on my YouTube channel.

Conservative voices are being silenced.

I said it on Joe Rogan.

Conservative voices are being silenced.

On the Jordan Peterson Kayak podcast.

Conservative voices are being silenced.

I said it on Tucker Carlson.

And Tucker, we know conservative voices are being silenced.

Twice, actually.

Like I said last time, Tucker, conservative voices are being silenced.

That is exactly right.

And I said it in my New York Times bestseller.

Conservative voices are being silenced.

It's a point I have to make over and over because conservative voices are being silenced.

In fact, you won't even use this footage.

Actually, we will.

Quote, or take the campaign for marriage equality.

We were almost pathologically civil, willing to debate anyone, anywhere.

And the harder the nut to crack, the better.

For two decades, I went to fundamentalist churches in Idaho, Mormon groups, Catholic universities, conservative media, right-wing talk shows, and C-SPAN, and published an anthology that included views from both sides.

We knew that if we wanted to win, and not just posture, we needed to reach conservatives and moderates and explore where we might agree.

And it worked.

It took time and we were laughed at at first, but you could see the polling slowly, inexorably shift toward us from one quarter to two thirds in our favor from the 1990s to the 2010s as our arguments and openness slowly, person by person, won over the country.

Yeah, I mean, so

I think it's not different than what we continue to do.

It's the same people who, you know, were part of litigating marriage equality, advocating for marriage equality, are also part of doing the advocacy on behalf of trans people.

And this is one approach.

It was one approach for marriage equality.

There were also protests in the street.

There were also kiss-ins.

There was also the 1980s that happened.

And

there are all sorts of examples of how you make change.

way that change happens isn't because of a singular strategy of being pathologically civil.

There's many different pressure points as there are now.

And the part that he's forgetting is the backlash that requires the continued persistence to defend the change that you've made.

Again, walking away just seeds the ground.

You know, one thing he touts a lot in this essay is like, one of the big things that we won and that we should have just stopped after was when we got HIV drugs.

And I'm like, how do you think we got HIV drugs?

I know he knows how we got HIV drugs.

Was part of it getting our feet in the door at the FDA and getting meetings?

Yes.

And do you know how those meetings were secured?

By ACT UP, which was a radical protest direct action group where people were literally living and planning on dying with HIV, who were laying down their bodies in the streets to stop traffic, to stop people from getting to their office to work at the FDA.

These were radical protests.

They were getting arrested.

They were being dragged off the streets by cops.

And those are the people that got us HIV drugs, which Andrew Sullivan seems very thrilled about, and which I am too, but how does he think that we got them?

It's just ahistoric.

Quote, now look at the recent results of the LGBTQ movement.

In the past five years, activists have managed to move public opinion away from their causes in many respects.

In 2021, for example, 62% of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that match their gender at birth.

By 2023, that figure had risen to 69%.

This is not bigotry at work.

This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans, 56%,

it's not that solid of a majority, favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination, the same policies that Andrew was opposed to in 2007.

Americans are broadly fine with transgender people.

They are fine with gay people.

They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology.

Now, I looked.

He did link the study where he's referencing these numbers of approval and disapproval on various trans and LGBT issues.

And I looked, and it was a Pew Research study he's referencing.

And this is misleading.

First of all, I would not call 56% of Americans thinking trans people should be protected from discrimination, a solid majority.

That's my personal opinion on the language there.

But second of all, All of the statistics that he's referencing moved together over the years that he's referencing.

So people did not become friendlier to non-discrimination laws at the same time that they became less friendly to trans inclusion in sports.

Less people today believe in protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs and housing and public spaces than they did a few years ago.

Less people believe in allowing them to use bathrooms aligned with their identity than they did a few years ago.

And less people believe health insurance companies should be required to cover gender-affirming care than they did a few years ago.

And this is just why I always say that it's like the whole sports thing, in my opinion, it's like a Trojan horse for all of the other issues that affect way more people.

Including all cisgender gay people, by the way, and all cis women for that matter, because this is about laundering in rhetoric and ideology that leads to policy changes that erode bodily autonomy and protections for everyone, whether that's abortion, sex testing in sports, marriage equality, or trans people's ability to access healthcare.

It's all related, and I think that's really important.

And these numbers are going down not because quote unquote activists went too far, but because there's been hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign and advertising spending going to make people afraid of trans people in sports and trans people in society.

Well, hold on, because, next paragraph, quote, on the medical question, 46% of Americans supported banning medical care related to gender transitions for minors in 2022.

Today,

as people have learned more,

56% do.

As people have learned more, it's it

nowhere in this does he bring up the extremely well-coordinated, well-funded, well-strategized right-wing culture war.

Like, did that have anything to do with people's changing perceptions of trans people, Andrew Sullivan?

Or was it entirely the kid on Tumblr with neo-pronouns in their bio?

And most people don't know what Tumblr is or what neopronouns are.

So I'm going to guess it's the hundreds of million dollar campaign to make people afraid of trans people, even though there were 928 people prescribed puberty blockers in a five-year period in the entire United States.

Quote, I hope this might prompt a rethink as the election results sank in.

Last week's Skirmetti decision at the Supreme Court was another reality check, as the court upheld Tennessee's ban on certain medical treatments for transgender youth, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, rejecting claims that the ban violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and shielding similar laws in other states.

When the ruling came down, the mood among LGBTQ groups was defiant, so the ranks are being closed again.

If Mr.

Trump is against childhood sex reassignment, then we must be for it.

If Mr.

Trump says there are two sexes, we must insist that there is a spectrum.

It will be very hard to break this dynamic in such a tribal atmosphere, especially when there is genuine transphobia among, especially when there is genuine transphobia among some on the right.

First of all, this idea that like I'm against the statement that there's only two sexes or that sex camp is a binary because I just want to position myself in opposition to Donald Trump and not that it's like, that's an authentic belief in and of itself is ridiculous.

And also this assertion that like somewhere on the right, there's genuine transphobia, but surely none of it is in this essay.

And again, I think this is coming back to the Times coverage and coming back to this: we're just asking questions.

It's sort of like there is real transphobia.

There, you know, there's things we should protect, but by focusing on this, we're doing a disservice to the movement, going back to the tweet, says person who doesn't care about you or your cause.

And I think it's, it's just, it's very insidious because people become really enchanted by the idea that they can still be quote unquote for trans people and against transphobia, but also be against healthcare for trans people, bathrooms for trans people, sports for trans people.

And guess what?

If we can't have healthcare, we can't go to the bathroom, we can't play sports with our friends in school,

we can't assert that we use a certain pronoun, we can't go anywhere in society.

Can you talk about that like dissonance?

Because clearly he doesn't think he's transphobic.

And clearly the readers of this essay who left comments like finally some sanity,

they don't think they're transphobic.

I mean, Andrew Sullivan genuinely thinks that he wants freedom and dignity for LGBT people.

Just he's only against all of the things that would provide that.

Yeah, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, it's like, if you just, if I think about it, just myself as a human being, if I couldn't, you know, if I couldn't say, you know, my name is Chase, I couldn't say, please call me him at work.

I couldn't go to the bathroom at work.

I couldn't have the healthcare that enables me to feel, you know, like I can move in my body and tolerate looking at myself and living in my body.

What is the world that I am living?

It's one where I have to, what, use my old name and be called something that I don't feel is who I am.

I can't go to the bathroom at work, which means I can't really go to work, which means I can't have a job, which means that I likely can't have housing.

And then what?

What is it that, what is this promise of equality then?

It's mythic because I actually can't maneuver in the world.

And

these efforts to ban trans people from using bathrooms are a ban on public space.

Public restrooms have always been a site of civil rights discourse because whether or not you can move into and out of public bathrooms is really a proxy for whether you can move in and out of the common spaces of society.

And the public bathroom is not this dignified place, and that's why we're protecting it.

So what it is is a a place where people have to interact with people who are different from themselves and that is why it causes so much anxiety and why it's been at the center of the disability rights movement the women's rights movement and the black civil rights movement and does andrew sullivan's belief that trans people should be excluded from certain portions of society begin and end with sports and puberty blockers for minors i'm not so sure let's find out quote Returning to a civil rights model and abandoning the quixotic attempt to end the sex binary does not mean, as some might have it, throwing trans people under the bus.

Trans people are already on the bus.

They are protected from employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Their existing rights should be defended and expanded to public accommodations, especially the adult right to have access to gender medicine through Medicaid, which is now being threatened.

Americans should back us on that.

But fighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women's sports and for biological men to be in women's intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones.

He always comes back to that.

He's like, some of them are just like me, is dumb, offensive to common sense, and risks a much bigger backlash.

So, okay, he does not think trans women should be able to use women's restrooms.

No.

He doesn't.

And I just, this part kills me because how did trans people get protected from employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act?

It was by the groups that litigated it and pushed for the protections for LGBT people in court,

not through Congress, because

we have consistently faced uphill battles in our efforts to pass non-discrimination legislation.

So again, the paradigm that equality has been reached in the way that Andrew Sullivan has suggested is false.

You know how we got the sports discourse started?

In 2019, when the Equality Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity and trans status protections into federal civil rights statutes, the entire bill was opposed on the ground of allowing trans women to participate in women's sports.

Guess what the bill did not do?

That, because it did not amend Title IX and it didn't address sports.

So it was this entire red herring that was used to undermine the equality protections that he hails and he purports to support.

And so at the end of the day, I really just want to ask everyone: the question is: do we fight full force for full equality for all of us, or do we just lay down and let our opponents take over the contours of the discussion?

Ready to round it out?

Ready.

We've been at this for a while.

We have.

Help us.

Quote: This does not mean the LGBTQ project should be shut down entirely.

We need to defend our wins.

We need to protect the interests of gays, lesbians, and trans people.

We need to greatly expand help and care for children with gender dysphoria, prevent bullying, and increase mental health resources.

Protecting them from often irreversible sex changes should not mean abandoning them.

It should mean renewed concern, support, and above all, solid, evidence-based research on how best we can help.

Just not using any of the evidence I personally disagree with.

All of these laws have banned the research, to be clear.

But in America, on this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember a critical thing.

We won.

We won because we defended free speech, reached out to the right and left and center, left others and children alone, and trusted liberal democracy, also being eroded by the party you support.

That trust was rewarded with one of the swiftest successes in civil rights history.

Let's not throw it away.

Mutual sigh.

Big sigh.

Big sigh.

We won.

Who won?

Andrew Sullivan did, or at least he seems to think so.

There's so many things to respond to, but everything he says we should do cannot be done if we don't do the things he says we shouldn't do, which is defend our ability to have medical care that we need, defend the ability of research into our

best practice medicine to continue, defend the ability of people to go to the bathroom, to go to school without discrimination.

It's all the same fight.

He parses it out and suggests that they're in opposition.

But in fact, fighting for either of them means fighting for both of them.

And again, I just wish he was honest about what he actually cares about, which is clearly like his own comfort.

You know, it's like, I don't, I really don't think he and a lot of these like conservative, gay, cis white types are like interested in, as they claim, like the LGBT movement.

Like, I think that, I think that Andrew Sullivan's cause is Andrew Sullivan.

I guess I just want to ask, like, to round this out, there were a lot of people who read this, people like my dad, who are like, yeah, this guy's making some points.

What would you, Chase, tell people who are reading this and all of the New York Times coverage and being like, hmm, good points.

Because

despite what Andrew Sullivan seems to think of people like me and people like you, I actually am very interested in reaching people.

I am very interested in meeting people where they're at.

I'm just interested in also taking them somewhere once I've reached them.

Yeah, and I am also very interested in reaching people and meeting people where they're at.

And I've actually spent my life doing it and growing and changing and challenging myself, which I think is part of being alive.

So I I think for people who read this article and thought, wow, there are some good points there,

I would want to say, let's go on a little bit of a history lesson because a lot of times this idea that a movement is going too fast, a movement is alienating people, and that's the reason they're being unsuccessful is deployed for a reason.

And it's not a new story.

It's one we've seen time and time again.

Let's talk about all of the other times we've heard that, whether it was about sit-ins during the civil rights movement, whether it was about women's demand for access to the work to work outside the home.

So that's one thing.

And then the other thing I would say is, how many trans kids do you think there are in this country?

How many trans kids do you think receive puberty blockers?

How many do you think played sports?

But how much have you heard about it?

And do you think perhaps that the outsized focus is to invoke a sense of fear and change for an ideological objective?

And instead, do you think perhaps that the kids who are loving and caring for those kids are the best to make the decisions about their medical care?

Do you think perhaps that the schools that are supporting the kids who are playing sports may be the best equipped to decide how to continue to administer those schools?

Because that's what we're talking about here.

And every single demand for change has been called radical at one point or another.

And yet, we have to persist in sort of continuing to demand that we live in a more just world.

I'm going to close this with a comment on this essay on the New York Times website from someone named Edith from New York.

Edith wrote, The homophobes at my high school do not specify if they mean a neopronoun user or a cisgender bisexual girl when they call us the F-slur.

They do not ask our pronouns before regularly excluding us.

They do not consider who is a correct transgender person, who is not loud with their gayness, and who is easy to understand.

Mr.

Sullivan, as a young queer person today, it really feels as though you're misinterpreting both how we got here today and how we are falling backwards.

Acting like conservatives will treat you better if you're a more palatable gay person and acting like younger people don't have the right to identify the way they please is how we slide back into further homophobia.

The way we keep our rights is by staying strong with each other, not picking apart the community to find an acceptable way of being queer.

I think you need to reevaluate and discuss these concepts with the people who are directly impacted by the laws being enacted today.

And I think you need to think on why you are complaining about your community when you should be celebrating 10 years of marriage equality with the rest of us.

Edith, you will be reincarnated as the lotus flower.

It is, it is, I want to end on a high note because it is really lovely to read from a 16-year-old who's smarter and more worldly and more profoundly empathetic and humane than Andrew Sullivan is.

Love to Edith.

Chase, love to you.

Thank you for being here today.

Thank you for coming on this journey.

This was a long one.

I really appreciate you have put yourself on the line time and time again.

You have fought so hard, including just recently in front of the Supreme Court.

And I don't know, I feel like people who put themselves out there the most are also obviously the most visible and available for critique by people like Andrew Sullivan, who is hiding away at his, you know, property in Provincetown writing for the New York Times.

And I just have so much respect for you.

And I think that you should probably be told that more often.

Thank you, Matt.

And I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and respect for you.

And I think we just, we can only benefit from more conversations and more people like you and more people like Edith.

And more people like Edith shout out Edith we love you sister

thank you for making it through this episode please if you made it this far send it to like your mom or like your dad like I may I make this stuff for you guys but I'm also really making it for people in your extended circles who might only be seeing the types of things like what we looked at today, like what my dad is seeing.

I really appreciate you.

I need you.

We all need each other to get through to the other side of this together, and we will.

And we'll laugh about it someday, and we'll laugh about Andrew Sullivan one day.

Until next time, stay fruity.